


Rite

by Anonymous



Category: Hockey RPF
Genre: (kind of), Body Paint, Frottage, M/M, Magical Realism, Marking, Stanley Cup
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-10
Updated: 2016-11-10
Packaged: 2018-08-30 06:16:34
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,092
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8521729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: It was weird, seeing Sid get hockey-intense in the middle of breakfast over Phil’s boring wildlife sighting. It was just a deer. They were all over the place in Pennsylvania. Phil didn't even know why he had even told Bones about it in the first place, much less why Sidney Crosby would care. Phil tried really hard to remember what he had said when he had first mentioned this to Bones, what he could have possibly said to make this so important.“It was just a deer, eh? It had fuzzy little antlers and it just sorta stared at me when I drove by.”





	

**Author's Note:**

> My first attempt writing something for Pens Monthly. For the September challenge, got all four prompts I think! Woohoo?
> 
> Not beta read, all mistakes are my own

It's about a week after they win the Cup. Phil hasn't been drunk the whole time, thank you very much, but he still isn't entirely sure how he got to this Cracker Barrel with Bones and Sid and Flower. 

The whole situation is… weird, to say the least. Phil seems to be the only one who's actually looking at the menu and trying to figure out what he wants. He's fucking  _ starving _ . The other three are mostly just glancing back and forth between each other and Phil. The conversation is weird, stilted, at least until the waitress takes their orders and the menus and leaves them alone again.

Bonino reaches out, taps his finger against Phil’s water glass, smearing the condensation a little bit. “Hey Phil, you should tell Sid that story you told me.”

“Huh?”

“About how you saw that deer.” His voice sounded like he was trying to seem casual, failing horribly.

“Oh.” Phil leaned back in his chair a little, surveying his teammates, feeling like he was at the center of a prank but knowing, somehow, that he wasn’t. “I, uh. Saw a deer in a graveyard.”

“In San Jose?” 

“No, right after we got back.” 

It was weird, seeing Sid get hockey-intense in the middle of breakfast over Phil’s boring wildlife sighting. It was just a deer. They were all over the place in Pennsylvania. Phil didn't even know why he had told Bones about it in the first place, much less why Sidney Crosby would care.

But all three guys looked very, very invested in this story for some reason.

“And?” Bones prodded

“And what?”

“What happened with the deer?”

Phil tried really hard to remember what he had said when he had first mentioned this to Bones, what he could have possibly said to make this so important.

“It was just a deer, eh? It had fuzzy little antlers and it just sorta stared at me when I drove by.”

“Are you sure you were driving?”

“Yea-” Phil started, then cut himself off. Up until that second, how could have sworn that he had been. But now when he thought, really thought about it, he couldn't be sure. 

All of a sudden it seemed that maybe he had just been standing, on the soft grass, looking at the deer as it regarded him with dark, soft eyes, but. He hadn’t been in a graveyard since the finals. Why would he have been? Phil just remembered seeing the deer so clearly - he couldn't doubt it, but it was the only way the memory made sense.

“Uh. No, I guess I'm not sure, but when else would I have seen it?”

Sid and Flower and Bones all looked at each other for a long minute, then they stared back at Phil.

Finally Flower spoke up “This is your first time winning the Cup. Right?”

“Yeah?” He said, making it sound like a question even though it definitely wasn't one. Phil knew it. Everyone knew it. Why did they even bother to ask. “So?”

“So.” Sid said, folding his hands in front of himself as the waitress arrived with their meals. “So, I guess I should probably explain a few things.”

\----

“You'll get another Cup Day, of course.” Sullivan said. “This is strictly off the record.”

As if  _ that _ was what Phil had been worried about, after Sid had told him about the rites. 

Maybe Phil had heard about this type of thing in passing, back when he had been with the Bruins, and then in Toronto, but he had just assumed that it was bullshit. A weird superstition at the most. He never would have guessed that it was a league-wide, time honored tradition.

“How will I know what to write?”

“Don't think too hard. It'll come to you.” Sully looked confident, which was good since Phil felt completely out of his depth. “And you'll know when you're done, don't worry.”

“How -”

“You just will. Trust, Phil.” Then Sully clapped him on the back and ushered him in through the door of the locker room.

The lights weren't on, but there was a dim glow that made the room seem hazy and surreal, different than it had even looked before. Phil almost expected to see flickering candles lined out on the benches, but there were none. The glow seemed to come from everywhere, except. That wasn't entirely right. The glow came from exactly one place.

The Stanley Cup had been placed in the middle of the room, dead center on top of the Penguins logo. Phil couldn't look away for a few long seconds, like he had been frozen by the sight of it. He was used it seeing it shining, silver and pristine, so the difference threw him for a loop. Because even though it was definitely  _ shining _ , now, there were long thick lines of some viscous black liquid that had overflowed from the cup and dripped down across the engravings.

But the Cup wasn't even the most eye-catching thing in the room.

Phil tried to swallow, but his mouth was too day to manage it very well, so the words caught rough in his throat when he finally said “Hey, Haggy.”

Carl was kneeling on the floor between Phil and the Cup, completely naked. He'd had his eyes closed when Phil had come into the room, had been swaying minutely from side to side, but he went still and his eyes opened lazily when Phil spoke up. Carl had his knees spread slightly apart, one hand on each thigh, and if Phil had though he was frozen by the sight of the Cup before it was nothing compared to how pinned he felt under Carl’s bright, bright gaze.

“Hey, Phil.” Carl grinned, easy and lazy like all of this was totally normal “I thought it would be you.”

Phil didn't know what to say to that. So he did what Sullivan had instructed him to earlier, which was to take off his clothes and fold them neatly in his stall, until he was as naked as Haggy. Carl watched him as he undressed, followed with his head a little bit, but when Phil moved completely behind him Carl took a deep breath and settled, back to facing forward as Phil stood beside the Cup.

This close, he could catch the scent of whatever that overflowing liquid was. It smelled like metal, like juniper and ice. So Phil was surprised when he dipped his right index finger in it and found that it was hot. Not burning or boiling, more like bathwater, but way thicker than anything Phil had ever seen come out of a faucet. Some of it clung to his finger when he pulled away, dark and shiny on his skin.

He had thought that Carl might flinch, at the first touch, but instead Carl just shivered for the briefest of moments - a fine tremble in his muscles, all over his body - and tilted his head down and forward. Phil thought his hair looked soft, fluffy even, where it had been tied up behind his head, but no matter how bad Phil suddenly wanted to run his fingers through it the urge to  _ mark _ was stronger.

Phil hadn’t known what he was going to do until he did it, but when he pressed his fingertip against the know at the top of Carl’s spine it just felt right. Right like shooting down the ice and knowing that the puck was coming to him, right like the feeling of a stick in his hand or being outside under the bright winter sky.

Despite all of Phil’s doubts, it seemed like Sid and Sullivan had been right. Carl was perfectly still underneath him, breathing deep and even, as Phil marked a wide curve across his shoulders, a line that traces down his spine, crossed by crooked slashes, the weird sort of oblique spiral that ties the whole thing together. The sigil seemed to almost flow through him, and Phil dipped his finger back into the cup again and again as he drew and he didn’t have to think about anything but it wasn’t quite enough to forget that -

(“Geno was the one that saw the deer, the first time we won the Cup together” Sid had said, cheeks heating before he busied himself with his bacon at the Cracker Barrel.)

\- that the marking was only the first part.

Eventually Phil stepped back, looking down at Carl, and he knew that the sigil was complete. But he still wasn't done. He wet his finger again, black liquid that gathered but didn't drip, and he drew a ring around his left calf. He started it on his shin, maybe a couple of inches below the hinge of his knee, and Phil felt a brief second of doubt as he drew the liquid around the back of his calf. Wasn't he supposed to be able to tell, when he was done? But then he finished the ring, brought his finger back to the black smudge of the starting point, and it was like connecting a circuit. 

It didn’t shock, not exactly, but it was like a great current of ozone slammed into the room, atmospheric electricity that made the hair on Phil’s arms stand on end. When he looked back up Carl was standing too, his eyes hooded as he stared at Phil but still shockingly bright in the glow of the Cup.

Phil felt flayed open and vulnerable as Carl looked at him, his body like a live wire. He couldn't help wanting to twitch and curl in on himself, to shield his body from Carl’s gaze, but before his sudden doubts could dig their claws in Carl closed the distance between them and grabbed Phil’s right hand by the wrist, brought it up to his face and sucked Phil’s blackened index finger into his mouth.

All of the breath went out of Phil’s lungs when he felt Carl's tongue wrap around his finger, the hot suction and the plush wetness of the inside of Carl’s cheeks. Phil was hard in an instant, all the blood rushing south out of his head, and he had to close his eyes as he muttered

“ _ Haggy _ . Carl, fuck, I -” They had both been silent since they had first greeted each other and Phil was almost startled by the sound of his own voice, too low to be loud but still seeming to echo in the locker room.

His eyes were still closed, so he felt it instead of seeing it when Carl pulled his finger from his mouth with a wet pop. Carl let go of his wrist and then their bodies were pressing together, sternum to groin, and Carl was kissing Phil, pressing their mouths together for one chase moment before he licked his way in between Phil’s lips, filthy and wet. Phil was shocked by how cold Carl's mouth was, when it had been so hot around his finger only seconds before, but it warmed against Phil’s readily enough as they kissed each other, warmed until Phil couldn't tell the two of them apart any longer.

They had to breathe, sooner or later, and Phil gasped as Carl hitched a leg up around Phil’s hip, grinding their cocks together. This would have been easier, if Phil would have been sitting down or even just had his back against a wall. But he couldn't move, other than to bring his hands around and grab Carl’s ass, well south of any of the markings, urging Carl on as he hitched his hips in little circles and cried out against Phil’s collarbone as he tried to climb him like a tree.

Phil knew that he wasn’t going to last, but from the sounds that Carl was making it wouldn't take him long either. He felt alive, electric, charged through with that strange energy as he watched the muscles of Carl's back, his ass, flex and shift as they rubbed off against each other. 

“Yeah, that's it. C’mon, just -”

“Oh.” Carl’s breath hitched, the air he exhaled on Phil’s neck sent shivers down his spine. “Oh, Phil.”

Then Phil felt the hot splash of come on his stomach, the sharp sting as Carl dug his fingernails into Phil’s shoulders as he shuddered through it. That was all that it took to send Phil over the edge too, and he squeezed his eyes shut against the pure pleasure of it, seeing nothing in the black except for the pure, bright silver shine of the Cup. **  
**


End file.
